Archaeology Public Dig Day!
Archaeology Public Dig Day!
Thursday, Sept 26 and Friday, Sept 27, 2019
9am-4pm
Annual Fall Public Dig Days hosted by the Fairfield foundation. Help professional Archeologist dig up the past of New Quarter Park. To register for the morning or afternoon slots, email fairfield@fairfieldfoundation.org. FREE event
Items most likely to be recovered include bricks, nails, plaster, shells, ceramics, glass, stone, and metal fragments. This dig focuses on the Ellyson Armistead site, an 18th-century manor located at the center of the park. Its foundation is one of several mapped by a French cartographer in 1782 when he recorded structures as possible locations outside Williamsburg to billet troops following the Siege of Yorktown.
Although the structures were later abandoned and had disappeared by the time the County opened the park in the 1980s, archaeologists searched for the most prominent site on the park property and found it in 2015. Subsequent research in York County records linked the structure to Ellyson Armistead, a York County sheriff from the 1730s to 1750s.
Public archaeology at the park is made possible through a partnership between York County, the Fairfield Foundation, the Tidewater Virginia Historical Society, the Middle Peninsula Chapter of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, and the York County Historical Museum.
New Quarter Park is located at 1000 Lakeshead Drive in upper York County near the Queen Lake neighborhood.
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